Content Decay: Recognize When Your Published Content Loses Clicks and Fix It With Clearscope

Content decay occurs when your published content loses organic traffic from its peak. This performance decline happens as content ages and needs to be addressed to maintain relevance, authority, and ranking.

Want more information on content decay and how to address it? Here’s our in-depth guide on content decay and strategies to fix it.

In this post, we will answer:

• Why we developed Content Decay

• What Clearscope’s Content Decay highlights

• How you use Content Decay

Here is how Clearscope makes it easier for you to notice and take action when your published content decays.

Why we developed Content Decay

Content decay refers to a decline in organic search performance, specifically a decrease in the amount of clicks to a page from its peak. These drops in performance are subtle and can easily go unnoticed, so it’s important to have a way to uncover when content decay is happening to avoid significant losses over time.

And that’s where Clearscope’s Content Decay comes into play.

What Clearscope’s Content Decay highlights

Our Content Decay report displays three important metrics by column:

• Clicks shows a sparkline of the number of clicks each webpage received per month over the last year. Click the chart to see more details.

• Decay is the absolute value of clicks lost between the peak traffic month and the previous full month. Example: 3,212 clicks (peak) - 2,187 clicks (previous month) = -1,025 clicks

• Pct calculates the percentage decline between peak traffic and the previous month. Example: -1,025 lost clicks / 3,212 clicks (peak) = -32%

We sort Content Decay by the greatest number of clicks lost (Decay column) in order to surface your published content with the highest risk of dropping in rank, relevancy, topical authority, etc.

How you use Content Decay

This is how you take advantage of Content Decay:

Please note: Clearscope’s Content Decay relies on you connecting your Google Search Console account to display the performance data.

1. Navigate to your Content Inventory from your Clearscope homepage

2. Select the “Content decay” tab in the left sidebar menu

3. Review your published content by:

• Clicking the spark chart associated with the URL for the number of clicks by month over the last 12 months

• Scrolling over the absolute value decline in the Decay column

• Seeing the decay percentage

4. Look for a specific web page by title or regular expression (regex) in the search bar

5. Export a CSV of your Content Decay information by selecting the "Export" button in the top right

6. Investigate the best action to take to address the decay of your published content

For a deeper dive into content decay, watch this full Clearscope webinar or the clip below: